Bill Roper's Journal

Not what I had in mind for today's post, but here's a lovely timelapse video of the Earth rising from the Moon.

Works for me!

https://twitter.com/wonderofscience/status/1525486288148627456

We got up early enough today to get out and get lunch before heading to the movie theater where I went to see Rogue One while Gretchen took Katie and Julie to see Moana. This worked out well for both of us. I enjoyed Rogue One quite a bit and it was a movie that it was nice to see in 3D on the big screen. I'll catch Moana (which Gretchen and the girls enjoyed quite a bit) once it comes out on disc.

One of Katie's school assignments that began over break is to chart the phases of the moon, starting last Thursday. This has been mostly an exercise in futility due to low clouds for the last few days. But there was a moderate amount of blue sky this afternoon, so when we got home from the movie around 4 PM, I told Katie to wait in the driveway and we'd hunt out the moon if it could be found.

Well, let's see. It's about three or four days since the new moon. The sun is there, just behind the house across the street. So I pointed at it, then traced back 90 degrees by cocking my elbow so that I was pointing to where the half moon would be. So today the crescent moon should be just about halfway in between. I swung my hand back toward the sun, stopped, traced down toward the southern horizon...

And there, a bit more than halfway up the sky on the line I was running down, was a thin sliver of crescent moon that you could easily mistake for the cirrus clouds drifting around in the neighborhood -- except, of course, that the clouds were moving a good bit faster.

Obviously, all of the star piloting in Rogue One was rubbing off on me.

The Hubble Space Telescope has located the most distant galaxy so far. According to the report, we're looking back to about 500 million years after the Big Bang to see a galaxy that's about a hundredth of the size of ours.

Meanwhile, chasing around the Internet during compiles, I found this wonderful blog by a member of the team that discovered Eris and other Kuiper Belt objects.

Via Instapundit, I find this article from the discoverer of Xena on how he helped get Pluto demoted from planetary status.

Sorry, shsilver...